Bill's Video Vault
Random films from my physical media collection that I happen to particularly like, or simply feel inclined to write about.
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2/29/2024 0 Comments life Life was released in 2017 to a mostly collective shrug and hasn’t garnered much enthusiasm in the years since. It’s not entirely difficult to see why. The story is a pretty basic riff on the shopworn Alien formula - a confined haunted house nerve jangler specially retrofitted for deep space. In this case, the six-man crew aboard the International Space Station (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ryan Reynolds) manage to pluck a solitary cell from the Martian soil and watch in awe as it rapidly evolves into a complex organism dubbed “Calvin.” Scientific amazement quickly gives way to consternation and then outright terror, however, as Calvin’s formidable survival instincts are triggered (it latches onto the hand of Bakare’s exobiologist and leaves it looking as if it got mangled in a hydraulic press), eventually leading to a breach of the laboratory firewall. Xenomorphic chaos ensues.
Life offers only nominal punch in terms of character, but it has a serious vicious streak - the sort that comes with serrated teeth. Director Daniel Espinosa deliberately keeps the film as lean and propulsive as possible (Reynolds falls back on his usual brand of snark, while Gyllenhaal’s lead performance is curiously slight, never quite asserting itself; Ferguson, not surprisingly, leaves the strongest stamp). Calvin is quite marvelous in conception. Alien’s iconic HR Giger creation was like something straight out of biomechanical nightmare, but Life’s antagonistic organism begins as a cousin of sorts to the delicately undulating woodsprites in Avatar, eventually evolving into more of a gelatinous, squid-like entity… terrifying in its biological efficiency. Some might argue it lacks personality, but that’s precisely the point. This is creature/creator myth at its most primal… scientists revive a single dormant cell that, with a swift and ruthless inevitability, becomes the architect of their destruction. There’s a layer of plausibility here that’s uncommon for a subgenre that typically traffics in baroque fantasy. Calvin feels uncomfortably tethered to our own cosmos. As with many science-fiction films of this nature, Espinosa does an effective job juxtaposing the existential vastness of outer space with the punishing claustrophobia of the sort of vessels required to inhabit it. He can’t transcend the more familiar beats of the genre, however - there’s a spacewalk sequence (because there’s always a spacewalk sequence) and the usual calamities involving malfunctioning life support systems and misaligned orbits. The ISS is a striking setting, with its maze of tubular corridors and angled solar arrays, but it’s also a limited one. There’s only so many places for Espinosa’s camera to go, only so many ways to dramatize bodies propelling themselves from one end of the station to the other in zero-g. Perhaps that’s why the movie struggled to capture the imagination (remember when people were initially convinced that it was a stealth Venom origin pic? It was a fun theory, if nothing else). Nonetheless, the savagely nihilistic ending absolutely rips - it stands alongside the likes of The Thing and The Mist in terms of sheer apocalyptic despair. The title may seem generic, yet it’s absolutely fitting. Life begets death and death begets life.
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2/27/2024 0 Comments dredd Peach Trees… this is Ma-Ma. Somewhere in this block are two judges. I want them dead. Until I get what I want, the block is locked down. All clans, every level… hunt the judges down. Everyone else clear the corridors and stay the fuck out of our way until the shooting stops. If I hear of anyone helping the judges, I will kill them and the next generation of their family. As for the judges… sit tight, or run. Makes no difference. You’re mine.
So says Ma-Ma (a genuinely frightening Lena Headey), the sliced-up ex-hooker turned gang warlord who rules over Peach Trees, a 200-story concrete apartment tower in the heart of Mega City One. Opposing her is Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) - the living, mythic embodiment of the law, his sense of justice as rigid as his perpetually clenched jawline - and his overmatched rookie partner Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby). Their presence threatens Ma-Ma’s manufacture and distribution of a deadly new narcotic called Slo-Mo, which, suffice to say, is a problem. Locking down the entire building and bringing two-hundred floors worth of heavily armed muscle down on their heads is the solution. Dredd was a box office disappointment in 2012, but the film has built a devoted cult following in the years since and it’s not hard to see why. Karl Urban lacks the implacable physical stature of Sylvester Stallone (who was born to play the part, but whose 1995 version was an overproduced and tonally cross-wired slag heap), but he captures the unyielding, tempered steel essence of the character - more symbol than man, which is why he never, ever removes his helmet (take notes, Sly). The film mostly ignores the satirical edge that the comics were known for (and some might argue that scrapping the social commentary defeats the whole point), but the tone is lean, mean and vicious. The Slo-Mo scenes (in which the brain perceives events at 1% their normal speed) have a distinctively surreal, otherworldly visual kick - as if the hypersaturated colors are are about to sear straight through the film stock. When Dredd and Anderson barge in on a drug den and a shootout ensues, we watch as bullets deliberately furrow through flesh, spatters of blood and brain matter suspended in midair like a Pollack pastiche. Earlier, Ma-Ma orders a trio of rogue dealers to be thrown from the 200th floor - but a hit of Slo-Mo as a parting gift ensures their descent to the atrium below literally feels like hours. The film was directed by Pete Travis, but tends to be associated more strongly with Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay. The premise has the endorphin-fueled quality of an addictive video game loop - no choice but to fight straight to the top, floor by floor, enemy by enemy, until the end boss (Ma-Ma) is finally reached - which is probably why it was blatantly lifted from the Indonesian action flick The Raid: Redemption (though Garland has strenuously denied this). Urban is well-paired with Thirlby, who, in a fascinating twist, is actually a cadet of mediocre standing - only in the running to become a judge because of her unprecedented psychic abilities. A psychic’s natural empathy is seemingly at odds with a judge’s cold-blooded “judge, jury and executioner” remit - and Thirlby plays this confliction well. Attempts to pigeonhole Urban as a generic action star now seem, in retrospect, a failure of imagination; his subsequent performances as Bones in the Star Trek reboot and Billy Butcher on The Boys have shown what a terrific actor he is. But you can tell he’s having fun. By the time Ma-Ma summons a quartet of corrupt judges to finish the job, you can almost hear his back molars cracking with righteous indignation (his snarled line readings sound like they were filtered through a double helping of gravel). The film is pure, muscular pulp - a triumph of visceral exploitation, endlessly watchable. And as the climax nears, the Peach Trees battleground in flames, Dredd patches into the complex’s intercom system and finally offers his official rebuttal to Ma-Ma’s opening salvo. In case you people have forgotten, this block operates under the same rules as the rest of the city. Ma-Ma is not the law… I’m the law. Ma-Ma is a common criminal - guilty of murder, guilty of the manufacture and distribution of the narcotic known as Slo-Mo, and as of now under sentence of death. Any who obstruct me in carrying out my duty will be treated as an accessory to her crimes… you have been warned. And as for you Ma-Ma… judgment time. |
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